How you can grow a healthy team culture like Ted with PETALS
Over the past year, we’ve been exploring how to improve team health across ASOS through a framework called PETALS. Let me explain what it’s all about…
What is team health and why is it important?
When you think of a healthy team, what do you think of? Is it a productive team, a happy team, a collaborative team, an efficient team? For me, it’s a combination of all these but not exclusively as it can all overlap as well.
But why does it matter? As an Engineering Manager, I’m constantly observing habits and dynamics within a team to make sure everyone is working well together.
After watching the brilliant Ted Lasso on Apple TV+, I’ve noticed quite a few crossover analogies for nurturing a healthy team (which I’m sure many other managers and leaders have too) but it all comes down to the simple concept that a healthy team constantly keep each other in check, helping each other to achieve a shared goal. We’re not talking Premier League here but striving to be at the top of your game is a great place for a team to be balanced.
What is currently available?
For those who work in software engineering, you may be aware of a few similar frameworks around the industry that try to help teams measure and improve their health.
The Spotify Squad Health Check is quite a common standard that focuses on a wide range of 11 factors from code quality & speed to deliver, to mission & fun. It’s based on a red-amber-green (RAG) rating system that provides a heatmap for organisations to see how their teams are doing overall.
ASOS has used this framework before, customising it with a few other factors (such as adding Mission and Strategy to understand the differences). We’ve seen useful results from most our teams but, due to the breadth of topics taking a while to discuss, they’re only organised on a quarterly cadence.
Google’s DORA Quick Check is another popular framework for teams to get a health check of common factors in software engineering, quite focused on technical and delivery metrics such as lead time, deployment frequency, change fail percentage and time to restore. These metrics can be automated providing a live view of the results but overlook the cultural metrics we struggle to observe.
What is PETALS?
PETALS is a framework that focuses on team culture and health, learning from the benefits of Spotify’s and Google’s efforts with a rapid feedback mechanism for teams to reflect on based on a blog I wrote back in May 2022. This does not replace the frameworks but complements them with a different lens and a focus on faster feedback loops.
PETALS is an acronym based on five common factors:
- Productivity
- Enjoyment
- Teamwork
- Learning
- Serenity
(The A comes from Average — explained below).
Individuals rate each factor from their recent iteration out of 5 (normally every fortnightly sprint but could be every week or month). This calculates an average score out of 5 for an overall view.
Scores are compiled by teams to capture a snapshot in time that then identify themes, outliers and (eventually) trends over time. These scores are arbitrary but they should prompt open conversations in groups about why individuals have chosen scores and what they can do to improve.
How ASOS has adopted it
The original pilot was introduced to a sample group of engineering teams to see how it might work.
Initially created with a Microsoft Form with Excel in SharePoint, this allowed teams to quickly capture data on their retrospectives and instantly see the results in a variety of charts and PivotTables. It allowed us to customise the experience quite easily for each team whilst also limiting the data visibility to a specific group of people by their SharePoint permissions.
As momentum grew and more teams adopted the framework, it got tricky orchestrating templates and configuring per teams, platforms and domains. Thankfully, our awesome Lead Principal Engineer, Dylan Morley quickly developed a custom app on our internal “Team Designer” infrastructure (more on that another day) that helped teams facilitate their own health checks with bespoke charts based on the previous Excel efforts.
Again, we piloted this with a few teams to see how it worked, iterating on some immediate improvements and continuously adjusting some of the user interface to simplify the process.
Since the custom app was released early 2023, we’ve now seen over 51 teams adopt the team health feature as a regular reflection framework demonstrating the growth mindset of our engineering teams and how they like to continuously improve.
The Reluctant Data-Driven Team
One of our Web teams had never used PETALS before and wondered how it could help.
Laura embraced the relationships and trust she had within her team to introduce PETALS by highlighting the data-driven approach to aid discussions. She presented the concept to her team (as part of her Growing Greatness apprenticeship — an internal programme that provides training into leadership roles), explaining the framework with her own spin, and agreed how they wanted to take it forward. She even jumped on the enthusiasm by facilitating a PETALS-based retrospective the next day.
Her team has now fully adopted the framework part of their typical retrospective cadence, taking scores every fortnight at sprint end, followed up with PETALS-based format every 8 weeks (4 sprints).
The Experimental Team
One of our teams in the Online Returns platform now do a dedicated PETALS session for 30 minutes alternate Thursdays (separate from their typical retrospectives) to explore specific improvement areas every 2 weeks.
They start their video call by submitting scores, share someone’s screen with the live results and talk through each factor individually explaining reasons behind personal scores and comparing notes. Everyone gets to talk, individual personal scores are referenced from the results grid, and they’re comfortable being honest about their feelings.
Any actions from their discussions are recorded on the team Kanban board classified as a PETALS retro action, so they get regular (daily) reminders and accountability on their agreed commitments.
The Traditional Team
Another team (in the Promotions world) made use of their team’s regular office day with an afternoon retro in a different environment to change the vibe — the pub.
They completed the data capture form in the morning straight after standup then print out the results to take offline.
They organised their retrospective around the PETALS topics with natural conversations in-person, using traditional Post-It’s and Sharpies (other non-brand stationery is available) to note down their personal thoughts and actions.
This leant towards a more engaging & focused retrospective, away from the new norm of online retrospectives, but still with actionable takeaways to take back to their ways of working.
(They did realise it’s a good idea to allow 10% extra time for writing/deciphering engineers’ individual handwriting.)
The (Structured) One-To-One
(This was an unintended but useful bonus from the PETALS framework, harking back to its origins as a personal reflection tool.)
With some of my direct reports, as a line manager I ask people to bring their recent personal scores to our next one-to-one discussion so we can deep dive into what’s gone well and what has been a challenge.
(If they’ve forgotten the scores or want a fresh set, it only takes a moment to rate each factor out of five).
We talk through the rationale for personal scores, identifying successes and challenges. This helps to structure our discussions and identifies clear actions from our session which I can then support as their line manager. It’s also an extremely safe environment to raise more sensitive topics that aren’t ideal in a team environment or if they find it uncomfortable to raise.
How has it landed?
Fundamentally, most teams who’ve trialled PETALS have continued to find it a useful framework to come back to. Whilst most have found their own application for their individual requirements, it’s encouraging to see the actual results:
- 51 teams out of ~80 now regularly reflect and discuss their team improvements — more than half of our huge tech department.
- A much healthier self-awareness of team morale and maturity through these common factors
- Leadership have better visibility to support team health across the organisation
If you want to find out more about PETALS and how it can help your teams, visit the PETALS.team website for some toolkits, advice and a regular newsletter on how it’s growing or even join the Linkedin group to discuss your own experiences.
Si Jobling is an Engineering Manager at ASOS. Having worked across several teams and departments since 2013, he’s used his knowledge and connections to create engaged communities around shared passions, often talking about them to anyone who (doesn’t) listen. This is Si’s passion project — one of many that he tries to fit around being a father of two and slave to two dogs.
